Back to Bats
by CampionSayn
Summary: From the outside, things that look like they may never have any life in them again, may just turn around and surprise people. One-shot, forum reboot challenge, Bat family fluff.


Title: Back to Bats  
>Summary: From the outside, things that look like they may never have any life in them again, may just turn around and surprise people. One-shot, forum reboot challenge, Bat family fluff.<br>Disclaimer: Yeah, okay, it's been said, buh-bye.  
>Warnings: This was made for one of the forums, so if you're not up to date, this may not make sense. Even if it is rather, and pointlessly detailed.<p>

Okay, so I cheated a little and didn't quite showcase everyone, but the two people left out were at least mentioned and it is over 500 words, so I'm happy enough with it. Whether or not anyone else is, that's their problem.

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><p><em>-:-<br>We know who you are. We __**are**__ you.  
>-CSI.<em>

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><p>The hotel didn't look as though it had been used in decades. All brick layers, empty white hallways where there was still evidence of the carpet having been torn out—bits of glue on the cement floor and all—and though some of the plaques that had been featured and tacked to each door had been taken down, Jason could make out shadows and darker paint of the carvings that had been holed in through ever one of them. Some looked like howling wolves on the bottom floor that Jason had once spent the night in once upon a time. Some frames looked rather like Grizzly bears standing up on the second level that many a pencil pushing hump had stayed in. The ones on the top floor were most clearly outlines of some kind of bird, though it was difficult to really tell.<p>

The upper levels tended to creak and crack whenever Jason entered them, but he could really care less about that at the moment.

Arms full of the groceries he had been sent out to get—_sent out_, like some friggin' courier that got their pasty asses handed to them whenever they went to school or couldn't get to their precious bikes they could fly by on the pavement on—the Red Hood blew his white bang out of his face; rather huffy, but not caring for the moment.

Stopping at the end of the flight of stairs that lead up to the "pent house" that was anything but after the place had been shut down because of some drug bust and couldn't recover from the bad publicity, he leant his weight on the guardrail and removed his very muddy shoes, kicking them off and aiming them to hit the door he was supposed to go into.

The shoes hit the dead center of the door and each left a lovely boot print. One was a little more filled out by the red clay mud he'd walked through to get to the store than the other and Jason found himself grinning at how he just knew his replacement would throw a hissy fit when he saw it.

…If he woke up today, anyway.

The door clicked open before the former hardcore vigilante could think more on that and he was met by two faces that in the last couple of days he had come to despise almost as much as when he had sent bullets careening at them in the old days of just a short time ago.

Dick leaned on the doorframe with that usual grin on his face, munching on the peach Jason knew for a fact, had seen with his own damn eyes, had been sitting in the back of the fridge with blue and green mold covering half of it. The circus boy had cut off and no doubt given the moldy pieces to those jumbo sized rats upstairs when Jason had left; apparent as it were for the side of the rotting fruit secreting juice down his palm and wrist. Jason had to physically keep himself from flinching in disgust when his elder "brother" bit into the thing and remarked jovially, "Alfred's not gonna be too happy when he sees you mucked up the door."

Beside the oldest bird boy, sticking to his side to no doubt soak up the warmth from his hip that was definitively lacking in the rest of the building aside from their room they had been holed up in for this "mission", scoffed with that noise Jason knew he would have a hard time typing if he were to put it on a report for a computer, crossing his arms like the pompous little brat he was—painfully slowly—growing out of, "It's Pennyworth's job to clean up after the mongrel. Why are you complaining Grayson?"

The brat had a point, and yet, still, both Jason and Dickie-bird frowned at the comment. What the frick…

Shaking off the one thing he and Golden Boy had in common—mutual respect for the butler that was more like a grandpa neither of them ever had—Jason bulldozed (practically) through the both of them. He moved immediately for the small kitchen the place came with, glancing just a second at the area that was the bedroom for all of them. This floor only allowed for its room two queen size beds and, bundled up like one of the dozens of newborn kittens Dick had gushed about Damian saving before Jay came back to the manor (the brat denied it, of course, but when Jason had spoken to Selina a week later, she had confirmed it with pictures) Tim still resided. He was burning hot to the touch and hadn't awakened in two days because of the pneumonia he was suffering from. He had made it clear that unless his temperature rose to a more dangerous level—at least a hundred and four, for the love of God—he would not leave and endanger the mission.

Sometimes—no, wait, a lot of times, Jason hated the little replacement for being so loyal to The Cause, but he hated Bruce even more for allowing and (worse) condoning the little stalker-punk ass-kid.

"Yeah, whatever," Jason muttered to nobody in particular, though Damian scuttled over to look and see—as every ten year old in America did—what spoils of the supermarket Jason had returned with, and raised a brow as though he had taken the comment to be directed at him.

Dick followed in after the both of them; though he grabbed the boots Jay had left and put them outside on the balcony their room came with so the mud they still slushed about wouldn't stain the rug, "Al and Bruce are coming over in an hour by the way. Are you going to clean up the stains or should I?"

Damian sniffed disdainfully at Dick, speaking as Jason unloaded some steaks and beer, "Why don't you just let Pennyworth do his job—"

"In a minute," Jason spoke over the brat, absently bringing a hand up beside the back of Damian's head and flicking him, smiling as he got the "Hey!" that he had hoped for, "I'm just going to put some water in the kettle-thing to boil."

Damian still looked indignant over the assault on his person, but swiftly got over it, leaning up on the counter to get a better look inside the paper and plastic bags Jason had come with, spotting numerous things that he both was and was not accustomed to seeing as he rarely watched anyone cook. Why would he need to know something like cooking when their family had Pennyworth and the exiled son of Talia couldn't prepare anything that wasn't killed out in the wilderness and roasted over an open fire on a spit? He had tried cooking one of those frozen dinner things, but Dick forbade him from doing so ever, ever, ever again after the eldest of the brothers had to put out the fire in the kitchen Damian had caused by using not one, but _two_fire extinguishers. Damian still wondered why Dick hadn't told Father about it when he came back from the dead—being lost in time—wherever he had gone.

"Why the water?" Dick asked, going over to Tim's bed and sitting right next to the middle sibling's feet to keep them warm with the heat of his—in all his ex-lovers' opinions—fine ass, "Are you making that gross coffee again?"

"No," Jay replied, not so insulted as he knew how bad his coffee tasted no matter how he mixed it up for flavor; his eyes drifting silently and subtly from Damian looking about in the biggest bad that Jay remembered the cashier placing the ice cream in over to Tim as he moved just a little onto his side, breathing a little lighter since before he had left and not perspiring too much into his pillow, "Hot cocoa."

Dick tilted his head, as did Damian, both looking hopeful and asking in perfect unison that nearly made Jason laugh out loud, "Did you buy the little marshmallows?"

"No duh."

Damian didn't make any sign of good will other than allowing his eyes to widen in a non-frightening way and then dove back into the bag, but Dick replied with raising both arms in the air, followed by a cheerful, "Whoo! Go Jay!"

Jason grumbled to knock it off and flipped on the stove, the blue gas flame licking out and silently over the red tea kettle he had set there, just near enough to his fingers to warm the pads and lining of his fingerprints.


End file.
